How Al Gore's Net Worth Caught Up With Mitt Romney's

Mitt Romney's net worth of $250 million is well-known by virtually everyone in America: after all, it was the primary campaign offensive used by the Obama team against his presidential challenger in an election run largely down wealth, and social class lines, and whom "Democrats targeted in ads and speeches as being out of touch with most Americans." What many may not know is that staunch democrat Al Gore's own personal wealth, has soared from virtually nothing in 1999 to a staggering $200 million according to an analysis conducted by Bloomberg.

To wit: "The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million in 1999 and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee... Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction. Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options."

Bottom line: "Whatever you think of Gore, one thing is indisputable: leveraging his aura as a technology seer and his political and climate work connections, Gore has remade himself into a wealthy businessman, amassing a fortune that may exceed $200 million. That’s close to the $250 million net worth of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, whom President Barack Obama and Democrats targeted in ads and speeches as being out of touch with most Americans."

Such a designation is missing when it comes to Al Gore, about whom people indeed think many things:

Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove climate change to the center of public consciousness.

Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.

His work and writing on global warming have earned him a share of a Nobel Prize as well as a South Park cartoon parody in which he tries to scare school kids to his beliefs with a fictitious global-warming surrogate monster known as ManBearPig.

So just how did Al manage to accumulate such a sizable net worth in just over a decade? Bloomberg summarizes how for Gore the "land of opportunity" certainly lived up to its name.

How Gore achieved this is as much about timing and luck as it is about business skills. His Apple board tenure has coincided with a 5,900 percent increase in its stock price. Current TV was a moribund “fixer-upper” when Al Jazeera stepped in to buy it at “a huge valuation,” said Derek Baine, an SNL Kagan cable analyst in Monterey, California.

Gore also had his share of flubs, most of them in his efforts at green-tech investing. An investment firm he helped to start took stakes in two carbon-trading firms that fizzled and also racked up tens of millions in losses in a solar-module maker.

There was hardly much promise in the young Gore as future consummate businessman:

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Reed Hundt, a Gore high-school friend, said of his business success.

Hundt, whom Gore helped get appointed to run Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission in 1993, didn’t detect a business gene in young Al back in their days at Washington’s private St. Albans School.

Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.

And yet he went on from "success" to "success", if initially by way of inheritance.

Back in 2000, about $750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.

Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, according to disclosure forms.

He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20- room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighborhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 -- weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage -- he purchased an oceanfront six- bedroom, $8.9 million villa in Montecito, California, where Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.

It was all uphill from there:

His ascent into America’s 1 percent happened quickly. After losing to Bush, he had enough wealth by March 2008 to put $35 million into hedge funds and private partnerships through Capricorn Investment Group, a Palo Alto, California-based company, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

The investment company was founded by his buddy, Canadian billionaire Jeffrey Skoll, who amassed a large part of his fortune in shares he was awarded as the first president of EBay Inc.

... including books:

His best-selling climate books, “Earth in the Balance,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” haven’t contributed to his wealth. Gore has long pledged any book and film money to his nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project, created in 2011 from two advocacy groups Gore founded a year earlier.

By the time of the Capricorn investment, he was already starting to rake in cash from Generation Investment Management - - a fund that incorporates “sustainability” into its investment approach. Gore co-founded GIM in 2004 with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Managing Director David W. Blood.

Public filings show that in 2008 through 2011 London-based GIM racked up almost 140 million pounds ($218 million) in profits to be split among its 26 partners.

... documentaries:

Gore had a string of connections and invitations to join what would turn out to be prosperous enterprises. Skoll’s Participant Media produced the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” based on Gore’s climate work. The movie was pivotal in helping him win his share of the 2007 Nobel and claim speaker fees at $175,000 a pop.

Prior to being invited to join Apple’s board, Gore was tapped as a senior adviser to Google Inc. (GOOG) before its 2004 initial public offering and at a time when it was not yet a household word. Google won’t discuss his duties or compensation though some in Silicon Valley believe his pay there may be as rich as his Apple remuneration, which that company is required to disclose because he’s a director.

... lots of networking and holiday parties:

Gore was made a partner at Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr, an early investor in Amazon.com Inc., Intuit Inc. and Google, joined GIM’s advisory board. At Kleiner Perkins, Gore helps with investment strategies and selectively advises companies but doesn’t lead deals or take board seats on startups the firm invests in. Kleiner Perkins declined to discuss his compensation.

...

Gore earns his keep in Silicon Valley beyond simply attending the annual holiday party. He’s made himself available to a number of technology companies that got startup help from Kleiner Perkins. Andrew Fisher, chairman of Shazam Entertainment Ltd., a mobile music app maker backed by Kleiner Perkins, said Gore flew to London two years ago and agreed to be interviewed on stage in front of about 200 company employees and business partners.

Gore’s preparation was first rate and it was clear that “he’s tremendously well-versed” in Kleiner Perkins’s investments, Fisher said. At the presentation, “he talked about his work around the environment, leadership in small companies, decision making, sitting on the board of Apple. People were fascinated with his insight.”

... "discovering the Internet":

They love Al Gore in Silicon Valley and why shouldn’t they? Gore never claimed, as some conservative critics have asserted, to have invented the Internet.

Still, as a Tennessee congressman and senator, he was the first national politician to see how personal computers connected to a system he popularized as the “information superhighway” would radically change the social and commercial landscape of the U.S. and the world.

He drafted the Performance Computing Act of 1991, often called the Gore Bill, which led to funding to build the system that later became the Internet.

... lots of luck:

None of this was lost on Apple when, in March 2003, Steve Jobs personally asked Gore to join the board. An Apple press release about the appointment was a techie love fest. “Al is an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro,” Jobs said.

Apple was trading at about $7.50 a share when Gore accepted the Apple board seat. The company’s stock closed at $449.98 on May 3 in New York. The escalation of his options alone would have made him rich.

Gore’s profiting from the Al Jazeera sale is another example of luck, timing or both. Gore and partners that included Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle, Hyatt Legal Services founder Joel Hyatt and San Francisco money manager Richard Blum bought the predecessor company for $70 million in 2004.

Re-launched as Current TV, Gore said at the time he wanted to create a “transformational” network. It would, like YouTube, thrive on youthful viewer input, be an antidote to Fox News and a liberal competitor to MSNBC.

... all leading to Mogul Al replacing Activist Al, when Current TV was sold to Al Jazeera:

The transaction also raised eyebrows because Gore, who has for years inveighed against fossil fuels and their role in climate change, sold the network to a company funded in part by oil-rich Qatar. Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show television program, asked in January, “Can mogul Al Gore coexist with activist Al Gore?”

Gore defended the sale on the grounds that, among other things, Al Jazeera has “the highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network in the world.” It’s a position Gore’s been forced to defend repeatedly along the tour for his latest book “The Future: the Six Drivers of Global Change.”

Cable TV analysts, meanwhile, were abuzz over the $500 million payout. Current had been seeking buyers for a while, aware that Time Warner might soon pull the plug, but had not found any takers until Al Jazeera stepped forward.

However, Gore's stunning rise to riches has not been without its ptifalls:

GIM has assets under management of about $8.5 billion. Its investment strategy and returns have been impressive enough that Britain’s Environment Agency asked it to manage 7.2 percent of its 1.6 billion-pound investment portfolio through 2014. That’s up from 4.8 percent in 2009, according to documents filed with Britain’s securities regulator.

At times the company’s green investing approach hasn’t worked. In 2008, with optimism that a Democrat-controlled Congress would establish carbon controls and an international climate treaty would be extended, GIM bought a 9.6 percent stake, in Camco International Ltd., a manager of projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

By early 2010, GIM had upped its stake in the company now known as Camco Clean Energy Plc to 18.6 percent, according to documents. By October of that year, with Republicans in the House saying no to climate legislation and Kyoto Protocol talks stalled, shares in Camco were taking a beating. GIM dumped its stake. Neither company would comment on GIM’s actions.

In another instance, GIM took a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up in 2003 by former derivatives guru Richard Sandor to take advantage of what the exchange’s founders hoped would be a government-mandated price on carbon. The exchange ran into the same headwinds as Camco and was sold to Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. in May 2010 for $581 million. It was later shut as carbon prices fell to all- time lows.

All of which has naturally led to accusations of being a sophist preacher and an opportunistic "climate profitter":

“Al Gore is like the preacher touting his moral purity and superiority,” Kish said. “Yet it turns out that heeding his preachings is directly linked to his financial interests.”

The jury is still out on Gore. One thing, however, that is obvious is that despite his lamentations...

Gore said in a May 1 interview with Bloomberg Television that American democracy has been “hacked” by the influence of money in politics and that he hopes activist investors will continue to exert influence on corporations globally to act in a responsible way.

... the same corporations that Gore managed to schmooze his way into and influence courtesy of levered money and on grounds idealistic, charismatic or otherwise, have been quite profitable for the 65 year old former Vice President.

But perhaps the bottom line is that we simply "don't know Al":

During a 2009 House hearing, Tennessee Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn tackled Gore on the issue of whether he had become a “climate profiteer” by betting on companies that might hugely benefit from his advocacy. Gore’s response: “Congresswoman, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”

Which, it appears, is just how Mogul/Activist/hypocrite Al likes it:

Gore declined to be interviewed for this story.

Thus, sadly, we will only be left to speculate, muse and wonder just what is the driving force behind the New Normal "inheritance to riches" American Dream.

Speaking of virtually and nothing, does anybody else find it odd that Mittens didn't lift a finger/spend a dime to contest the election results when there was a mountain of evidence pointing to voter fraud of biblical proportions?

im sorry, but due to desensitzation of my ability to determine what aot of money is these days, i feel sorry for both these guys......when they get john "no i did not win the derby" kerry money than call me.....

why does anyone support a "party" - we should all be individual thinkers. The first loyalty for a party member is their party, not their constituents. Perfect formula for corruption and efficient for corps. Lot of people to chase if they were all independents. Thousands of Jurors make very important decisions, some life and death, every day. THe last thing they do, is worry about their party

No surprise here. One, he bought his way through the primaries. Two, why can't somebody with so much money be bothered to really invest in some jobs here? Oh, he was perfectly comfortable making promises about distributing everyone else's tax money, but his was far too precious to waste on the peasants. You're telling me he didn't have a single idea in his head for a product or service? Or know anybody else with one? No, he thought he was going to buy his way into office and loot the place just like he always has since the first day he was chauffeured out into the world of "work."

I imagine that Mittens, like Gore, was offered cash or setup in sweetheart deals that will pay off. Hey, is it better to be the President or to have a 9 digit payday for the coming decade. I'm thinking the latter.

If you are a two income middle class family that doesn't blow its money on crap and invests wisely, certainly one million is trivial these days. My parents, now in their 70s, single income family, two kids, dad was a middle manager in accounts, no major acheivments in career, no major investment risk taking are now worth about a million.

You and Bob are both right- about older folk. But the average, reasonably talented middle class young family today has no hope in hell to achieve the same million equivalent in their lifetime.

Declining real incomes eaten by inflation will continue to impoverish what otherwise ought to be the backbone of the nation. And please don't answer me with the inflationary/deflationary bouncing ball in financial assets as orchestrated by the Fed.

I am just saying my fairly average senior citizen parents would qualify as "millionaires" with no significant financial feats except shrewd saving. I thing a good chunk of the middle class loss of wealth is because marketing is so good at getting people to waste their money. My folks never borrowed except for the house. we had used cars, handmedowns, cheap local meat and veg, you name it. I see working class folk at the store loaded with expensive prefab frozen food, tonnes of unhealthy crap, take their five dollar vanilla lattes and hop in their suv's. Then I see the wealthier folks buy cheaper food that is more healthy. ok, i am ranting now.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 was awarded jointly to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"

"Gore co-founded GIM in 2004 with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Managing Director David W. Blood."

Al Gore has worked long and hard for the Banking Mafia Elite. Now he is rewarded for services. The same way Soros was rewarded. Furthermore, our respected politicians also learned how to reward themselves using the public trough. The rest is just hypocrisy and lies. There is no way one can succeed in America and EU having any honesty and integrity.

As for common people, they always were stupid and greedy fools trying to get something for nothing and/or just steal anything at a first available opportunity.

His big sources of money were from good timing/luck on Apple stocks and selling the TV network, both legal. I don't like the guy: I do think climate change is a problem but he actually did a disservice to the issue with his movie. However, on the standards of the bankers and billion dollar fraudsters, this guy doesn't rate. He wasn't even that rich after his term as VP.

There's no such thing as timing--I simply don't believe that all politicians are that lucky! They have inside information that we can't get at and they trade on it. They know what land will become valuable and when--they know exactly where highways will be put in, where malls and housing developments will go in, everything. This is what crony non-capitalism is all about.

Could not care about Gore one way or another, but... I have to call you out on this 'factoid' of yours: Bullshit!

DYOH on Glass-Steagall dismantling, and you'll see that this was done by a GOP-led and dominated foursome -- sponsored & led by none other than that slimmy Phil Gramm (R-Tx). Who later sat on the Swiss UBS board. I contend that this was a Wall St creation, enabled by eager GOP beavers. 'Beavers-for-rent'.

If you had watched the 60 Minutes report of this a few years back, you'd know that this was a total Inside Job. The poison-pill text got inserted at the last minute, into a budget bill, and was never read. The bill passed as the last act of Congress, in a lame-duck session of Dec., 1999. It totally set the stage for the Wall St scams since then. Most of which occured on the Bush/Cheney watch.

Piss off with the red/blue horseshit and propaganda. The Democratic House pushed the intial bill through in July 1999. Then on November 4, the final bill was passed by the Senate 90-8, and by the House 362-57. The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999.

Maybe if you did a little research, you would be aware that your fellow blue team flag-wavers Robert Rubin and Larry Summers were instrumental to the repealing of Glass-Stegal.

"Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers also steered through the 1999 repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act (1933), which had separated investment banking from the retail side. It allowed the banks to develop and sell the mortgage-backed instruments that became a principal factor in the financial collapse. In September 2011, the UK Independent Commission on Banking released a report in which it recommended a separation of investment and retail banking to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis"

Indeed, and with the help of Greenspan and Levitt (SEC), they blocked Brooksley Born's efforts at the CFTC to regulate and reel in the toxic derivatives witches brew that we are now firmly entrenched in.

Never liked Gore, but you do have a point. Seems a fairly honest way to have amassed a fortune, and unless someone has new info, I don't see the hand of GS/JPM in this at all.

Just unfortunate that many hate the wealthy just because, and his political career doesn't help either. I did feel sorry for him at one time because he got such a pounding from the neocons during his presidential run. Looking at the posts, the same neocon bullshit about Gore was programmed into hardwiring with some people.

He did sell out on the carbon tax - which has noting to do with addressing the ice cores, no matter what one thinks of the science. Even the scientists say it's BS. No matter what you think of him, I lost the last ounce of respect when he stood down to the political machine in the 2000 election proving, once again, who and what he takes his orders from...

There was nothing honest about it; the article is a sad crock Tyler should be ashamed of. Gore sold his influence to the likes of Steve Jobs for money. He sat on Apple's board and ran interference between Jobs/Apple insiders and the shareholders.

When the options backdating scandal came up, it was proved beyond any doubt that insiders looted hundreds of millions from the common stock holders by dating the options to the lowest price of the past quarter or year. Gore found no wrongdoing; just a need to "revise company policy".

Next, Steve Jobs awarded himself $600 million in AAPL stock at a board meeting that never happened. He then fabricated the minutes to that bogus meeting after the fact. Again, Gore covered for him. Gore the Whore.

You can make a million bucks if you work hard enough at an honest business for a lifetime. But "behind every great fortune lies a great crime". Or in Gore's case, a whole litany of them.

IC, thanks for the reminder. This crap of insider dealing gets so thick that even after getting all worked up about a single gigantic theft, it loses potency with each bigger and better iteration of incomprehensible theft.

also rather unfortunate that quickest & longest path to the greatest wealth leads through the den of deception and the urinal of hypocricy. if "the wealthy" can figure a way to squeeze through the eye of a needle, it might be a fortunate time to reconsider, but have you any evidence that that discovery has been made yet?

Which dirty hand of the Financialization Cartel or the Political Payback crowd (wink-wink, nod-nod) contibuted to Gore's "amazing good luck" is immaterial. It is payback for favors and politcal access. Period.

Do you think China's favorite son Bill Clinton would be as fortunate if he hadn't promoted letting China into the WTO ? Killing middle class American jobs is a minor detail when you're feeding at the trough.

Quoting:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

Now, in this context, is there any difference between "created" and "invented" ? There is not. Gore stated, clearly, that the existence of the internet was of his doing.

Riiiiiight. Al Whore's net worth in 1992 was between $153,000 and $345,000. He came from money and influence and was still floundering until he sold out his inherited influence to the correct people. Saying this is good timing, is an insult to the law-abiding citizens of the US.

She has to be brilliant to have stayed out of prison after all her crimes. The cattle futures scandal was the least of it, but it demonstrated the complicity of the MSM one more time.

MSM: How'd you make all that money in cattle futures?

Hellary: I just, like, read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and heck, it was easy.

MSM: Well, okay then.

What really happened was that the brokerage house made numerous trades in cattles futures. After they settled, they assigned the winning trades to the Governer's wife, and the losing trades to some poor schmuck clients who weren't connected to Governor Priapism.

for the majoirty of Americans that is all that matters, it does not matter if you loot companies, steal pension money, inherit money, steal from the church - as long as someone has money they are envied. The easier you get it the better.

This may be the explanation for last weeks NFP report showing such a large rise in employment centered around twenty something females in the entertainment/ health care fields. Bullish for 'massage therapists'

-Temp work only-

How many minutes is the employment contract for? Inquiring minds want to know.

I use a nice 54 year old massage therapist that is as left as the day is long. I couldn't believe that she knew nothing of AlGore's mashing of a massage gal and then her dismissal of it all being impossible because of the guy's perfection in humanity.

I have converted her to a sort of anarchist when I talk to her, but she relapses into algoreisms when away from thinking out her situation.

She still has not bothered with the travails of one of her own co-laborers when in a session with Mr. Green.

No you have been promoted to the grill. Remember Cliff, that 46 year old white guy with a masters degree, wife and three kids.? He just jumped off a bridge so he won't be working the grill any longer. Now flip the burgers.

"Sorry, in my fervor to spread the Gospel of Global Warming, I simply forgot to tell everyone there was a mistake at the printers and that the Hockey Stick Graph was measuring my future bank account and not CO2 levels.

thanks man. someone shared this link last week and i ignored it cuz of my aversion to TED due to their association with BigAl. just goes to show ya that the answers may all be under the rocks that we choose to ignore.

pretty compelling argument he makes. i see it got the vegans all worked up, that alone means it's got something going for it!

trying to figure out how many livestock/acre would be ideal...any thoughts?

A NASA-led modeling study provides new evidence that global warming may increase the risk for extreme rainfall and drought...

The study shows for the first time how rising carbon dioxide concentrations could affect the entire range of rainfall types on Earth.

Analysis of computer simulations from 14 climate models indicates wet regions of the world, such as the equatorial Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions, will see increases in heavy precipitation because of warming resulting from projected increases in carbon dioxide levels. Arid land areas outside the tropics and many regions with moderate rainfall could become drier.[NASA 3rd May, 2013 ~ has a useful video]

how did Al Gore amass such a fortune ? kinda like the way the Clinton's amassed a fortune...... methinks it's called grift & scams. it's always amazed me how the little guy has to go out & work for $8.50/hr minus taxes, of course ... while those who wormed their way to the top never really have to 'work' or 'labor with their hands & body' to earn fortunes. just you wait until the average guy figures out that they've been had. that the little they did manage to save is declared worthless currency...oh dear, this is gonna be bad. thank god i've figured it out & thank god i had Grandma Jo (born 1915, god rest her soul) who railed with fists in the air at the government & wall st. Now, i trust no one, too.

Gee, I wouldn't ask for much, just a chance like Hiliary had with the Chicago Comex to parlay $1,000 into $100,000 years ago.

I thought those kinds of "rides" (like the chemotherapy kid running the ball for a touchdown against the pros) were given to unfortunate kids who, unlike the rest of us, were dealt a much more rotten deal in life.